Eve of Deletion

The day next to the day that I will write the last entry for the blog "Life In The Cove." Many random thoughts to put down before I close this out and move on to the next adventure:

1. I never finished the tale of the trip in the fall of 1984 when I spread the love and joy that only a petrol company credit card can. The cliched image of the majestic beauty of a plume of snow, a faint white feather, arching over the top of Mt. Shasta. Before that, running into an auto body shop to get a leaking tyre fixed, the mechanic offering to repair the tyre if I explained to his satisfaction, his Oregon common sense, what a Tennessee Volunteer is - right or wrong, I told him it was a nickname given for the irregulars who volunteered to fight in the War of 1812 - he accepted my ready answer and sent me on my way after also replacing a broken headlight. Stopping at the California state line for emissions testing and discovering that the emissions tester was from Johnson City, Tennessee, and couldn't believe I was from Kingsport and had attended ETSU (main campus in Johnson City) - she admitted she missed east Tennessee but loved her California lifestyle. Not finding my hometown friend, Joey, a CalTech student, at the last known address I had for him on Wilshire Boulevard, with no forwarding address to help me so I drove out of the LA basin, stopped in the desert outside of town for a few hours and contemplated what to do. I'd driven from Nashville to Seattle, from Seattle to LA, and now from LA to...? Before I left southern California, I stopped in the east LA area because I'd run low on petrol. Off the freeway, I found the neighbourhood I was in contained folks who spoke no English. My 1st, 2nd, and 7th grade Spanish language lessons had faded, leaving me with the basic hello/goodbye/my name is expressions, which help little when asking if there is a petrol station that would accept my credit card or a place for me to exchange my Coke glass bottles for cash. Eventually, an older Asian lady told me she'd accept some of my Coke bottles for $2 worth of petrol but I had to leave the neighbourhood and get on the freeway because I was in a nrighbourhood in which I didn't belong. Back in the desert, I found that a plugged tyre loses air quickly, forcing me off the road late one evening. I found a small town with two petrol stations - stopping at one, I asked if I could purchase a used tyre with my credit card. The young man (more like a boy in his early teens) said that he couldn't fix or replace my tyre but his twin brother running the other petrol station could replace the tyre and let me charge the repair to the this petrol station. [I wish I could make this kind of stuff up but it's true, a small town with twin boys running the town's only petrol stations for their father - is that normal for small towns? I don't know.] At the other petrol station, the twin brother showed me where the mechanic who no longer worked there (due to a head injury which happened because he) had accidentally inflated a tyre with the tyre iron still stuck between the new tyre and the rim, shooting the tyre iron up into the roof of the metal mechanic shop roof. Both twins quizzed me about my trip around the country, wondering if they were any different or more special than anyone I'd met along the way. Normal in their appearance and behaviour, the fact they were 12 years old and operating two petrol stations on their own was unique enough that I told them they were the most different guys I'd met. Then, back on the straight shot east, painted deserts, pueblos and roadrunners racing past the monorail windows. Showing up back at the parental units' home, the phoenix rising from ashes, the prodigal son returned. The start or renewal of writing for myself, using the world of text, history, data, and wisdom to layer my life within pages of modern hieroglyphs.

2. Remembering the financial panic that struck not long after Andrew Jackson served in the timeframe of the 1830s as chief executive administrator of the largest political entity on this continent. Cycles. Decisions. The hindsight of hindsight. The species of species. Thanks to John Meacham (American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House) for the insightful history lesson. Looking for similar info from Saawariya and Dostoevsky.

3. The number of relatively young people listed in the obituary section of my hometown newspaper, their common cause of death cited as "died unexpectedly." Is it my imagination or does there seem to be a higher number of these deaths than in years past?

4. Signs that the global economy is picking up, with increased backorders for electronic parts.

5. Seeing how much time children spend teaching and disciplining their parents, as much if not more than the other way around. If you're of reading age, I recommend you research ways to better educate your parents.

6. Turning the compositions of Orlando Gibbons into new tunes, each note a word, each chord a scent, each musical phrase an image, then breaking that down into a very ultrawideband broadcast (exactly how many wavelengths can you send and receive?), using latent time passages to re-broadcast the composition, now jumbled out of sequence and reassembling itself according to a mathematical formula that "sees" multiple dimensions at once, the x, y, and z of three-dimensional space a simple starting place. We're geared to hear music in the 20 to 20,000 Hz soundwave range or so we've been led to believe. What if you knew you heard and felt more? What if life as you know it was a symphonic tour de force? Can you place all seven billion of us in that musical score? Can you hear the triumphant and tragic melodic phrases that the air you breathe makes in its intermixing with the rest of the local features of the universe? Are you ready to sing more than a few chorus lines?

7. Slowing down and listening to the echoes of the environment around me, the expressions of the universe that never quite get formulated in my thoughts. Looking at and not seeing the people patterns my life has made so comfortably easy to see. For instance, microwave oven radiation and wireless radio communication signals don't mix well.

8. One more day before I close this chapter of the book of life.

9. One more day before we discover the door that unlocks a brand-new future for our species, before we discover we are not a species, before we make the leap across the chasm that divides the repetitious behaviours of ones on this planetary body from a fascinating superset of stimuli and step into a new way to live, Earth's gravitational pull more a thought, a faded memory, than anything we can call reality. We put distractions away, grow into new shells, new combinations of energy levels and become that which we can barely dream possible. We are, or will be, no longer we.

10. Circadian rhythms. Light therapy. Body part replacement techniques. Creation science versus evolutionary science. Ancient history. Time to let go of time. No room for commercial enterprises. No place for political debates. And then this blog disappears to make way for the next new thing(s). Can you see the future?